COMP 154 - Ethics and the Internet

Cross-Listed as PHIL 225

This course looks at ethical questions connected with the internet as we know it today: an online environment where content is generated and shared through user activities such as blogging, media sharing, social networking, tagging, tweeting, virtual world gaming, wiki developing, and the like. We will start by considering debates over freedom of speech, privacy, surveillance, and intellectual property: issues that pre-exist the development of the Internet, but which because of it have taken on new dimensions. From here we will go on to take up some ethical questions arising from four different domains of activity on the social web: gaming, social networking, blog/wiki developing, and “hacktivism.” In the third part of the course, we will consider broad questions connected to the integration of the Internet with devices other than the personal computer and mobile phone and which open the prospect of a world of integrated networked systems. What are some of the impacts of such integration on our everyday ethical relations with others and on the overall quality of our lives? How does being networked affect the meaning of being human? Offered alternate years. (4 Credits)